Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.